Dombey and Son
“Well, Miss Floy,” returned Miss Nipper, who was full of burning
indignation, and minded her stops even less than usual. “I can’t help
it, blue he is, and while I was a Christian, although humble, I would
have natural-coloured friends, or none.”
It appeared from what she added and had gleaned downstairs, that Mrs
Chick had proposed the Major for Mr Dombey’s companion, and that Mr
Dombey, after some hesitation, had invited him.
“Talk of him being a change, indeed!” observed Miss Nipper to herself
with boundless contempt. “If he’s a change, give me a constancy.”
“Good-night, Susan,” said Florence.
“Good-night, my darling dear Miss Floy.”
Her tone of commiseration smote the chord so often roughly touched, but
never listened to while she or anyone looked on. Florence left alone,
laid her head upon her hand, and pressing the other over her swelling
heart, held free communication with her sorrows.
It was a wet night; and the melancholy rain fell pattering and dropping
with a weary sound. A sluggish wind was blowing, and went moaning round
the house, as if it were in pain or grief. A shrill noise quivered
through the trees. While she sat weeping, it grew late, and dreary
midnight tolled out from the steeples.
Florence was little more than a child in years—not yet fourteen—and the
loneliness and gloom of such an hour in the great house where Death had
lately made its own tremendous devastation, might have set an older
fancy brooding on vague terrors. But her innocent imagination was too
full of one theme to admit them. Nothing wandered in her thoughts but
love—a wandering love, indeed, and castaway—but turning always to her
father.
There was nothing in the dropping of the rain, the moaning of the wind,
the shuddering of the trees, the striking of the solemn clocks, that
shook this one thought, or diminished its interest. Her recollections
of the dear dead boy—and they were never absent—were itself, the same
thing. And oh, to be shut out: to be so lost: never to have looked into
her father’s face or touched him, since that hour!
She could not go to bed, poor child, and never had gone yet, since
then, without making her nightly pilgrimage to his door. It would have
been a strange sad sight, to see her now, stealing lightly down the
stairs through the thick gloom, and stopping at it with a beating
heart, and blinded eyes, and hair that fell down loosely and unthought
of; and touching it outside with her wet cheek. But the night covered
it, and no one knew.
The moment that she touched the door on this night, Florence found that
it was open. For the first time it stood open, though by but a
hair’s-breadth: and there was a light within. The first impulse of the
timid child—and she yielded to it—was to retire swiftly. Her next, to
go back, and to enter; and this second impulse held her in irresolution
on the staircase.
In its standing open, even by so much as that chink, there seemed to be
hope. There was encouragement in seeing a ray of light from within,
stealing through the dark stern doorway, and falling in a thread upon
the marble floor. She turned back, hardly knowing what she did, but
urged on by the love within her, and the trial they had undergone
together, but not shared: and with her hands a little raised and
trembling, glided in.
Her father sat at his old table in the middle room. He had been
arranging some papers, and destroying others, and the latter lay in
fragile ruins before him. The rain dripped heavily upon the glass panes
in the outer room, where he had so often watched poor Paul, a baby; and
the low complainings of the wind were heard without.
But not by him. He sat with his eyes fixed on the table, so immersed in
thought, that a far heavier tread than the light foot of his child
could make, might have failed to rouse him. His face was turned towards
her. By the waning lamp, and at that haggard hour, it looked worn and
dejected; and in the utter loneliness surrounding him, there was an
appeal to Florence that struck home.
“Papa! Papa! speak to me, dear Papa!”
He started at her voice, and leaped up from his seat. She was close
before him with extended arms, but he fell back.
“What is the matter?” he said, sternly. “Why do you come here? What has
frightened you?”
If anything had frightened her, it was the face he turned upon her. The
glowing love within the breast of his young daughter froze before it,
and she stood and looked at him as if stricken into stone.
There was not one touch of tenderness or pity in it. There was not one
gleam of interest, parental recognition, or relenting in it. There was
a change in it, but not of that kind. The old indifference and cold
constraint had given place to something: what, she never thought and
did not dare to think, and yet she felt it in its force, and knew it
well without a name: that as it looked upon her, seemed to cast a
shadow on her head.
Did he see before him the successful rival of his son, in health and
life? Did he look upon his own successful rival in that son’s
affection? Did a mad jealousy and withered pride, poison sweet
remembrances that should have endeared and made her precious to him?
Could it be possible that it was gall to him to look upon her in her
beauty and her promise: thinking of his infant boy!
Florence had no such thoughts. But love is quick to know when it is
spurned and hopeless: and hope died out of hers, as she stood looking
in her father’s face.
“I ask you, Florence, are you frightened? Is there anything the matter,
that you come here?”
“I came, Papa—”
“Against my wishes. Why?”
She saw he knew why: it was written broadly on his face: and dropped
her head upon her hands with one prolonged low cry.
Let him remember it in that room, years to come. It has faded from the
air, before he breaks the silence. It may pass as quickly from his
brain, as he believes, but it is there. Let him remember it in that
room, years to come!
He took her by the arm. His hand was cold, and loose, and scarcely
closed upon her.
“You are tired, I daresay,” he said, taking up the light, and leading
her towards the door, “and want rest. We all want rest. Go, Florence.
You have been dreaming.”
The dream she had had, was over then, God help her! and she felt that
it could never more come back.
“I will remain here to light you up the stairs. The whole house is
yours above there,” said her father, slowly. “You are its mistress now.
Good-night!”
Still covering her face, she sobbed, and answered “Good-night, dear
Papa,” and silently ascended. Once she looked back as if she would have
returned to him, but for fear. It was a momentary thought, too hopeless
to encourage; and her father stood there with the light—hard,
unresponsive, motionless—until the fluttering dress of his fair child
was lost in the darkness.
Let him remember it in that room, years to come. The rain that falls
upon the roof: the wind that mourns outside the door: may have
foreknowledge in their melancholy sound. Let him remember it in that
room, years to come!
The last time he had watched her, from the same place, winding up those
stairs, she had had her brother in her arms. It did not move his heart
towards her now, it steeled it: but he went into his room, and locked
his door, and sat down in his chair, and cried for his lost boy.
Diogenes was broad awake upon his post, and waiting for his little
mistress.
“Oh, Di! Oh, dear Di! Love me for his sake!”
Diogenes already loved her for her own, and didn’t care how much he
showed it. So he made himself vastly ridiculous by performing a variety
of uncouth bounces in the ante-chamber, and concluded, when poor
Florence was at last asleep, and dreaming of the rosy children
opposite, by scratching open her bedroom door: rolling up his bed into
a pillow: lying down on the boards, at the full length of his tether,
with his head towards her: and looking lazily at her, upside down, out
of the tops of his eyes, until from winking and winking he fell asleep
himself, and dreamed, with gruff barks, of his enemy.
CHAPTER XIX.
Walter goes away
The wooden Midshipman at the Instrument-maker’s door, like the
hard-hearted little Midshipman he was, remained supremely indifferent
to Walter’s going away, even when the very last day of his sojourn in
the back parlour was on the decline. With his quadrant at his round
black knob of an eye, and his figure in its old attitude of indomitable
alacrity, the Midshipman displayed his elfin small-clothes to the best
advantage, and, absorbed in scientific pursuits, had no sympathy with
worldly concerns. He was so far the creature of circumstances, that a
dry day covered him with dust, and a misty day peppered him with little
bits of soot, and a wet day brightened up his tarnished uniform for the
moment, and a very hot day blistered him; but otherwise he was a
callous, obdurate, conceited Midshipman, intent on his own discoveries,
and caring as little for what went on about him, terrestrially, as
Archimedes at the taking of Syracuse.
Such a Midshipman he seemed to be, at least, in the then position of
domestic affairs. Walter eyed him kindly many a time in passing in and
out; and poor old Sol, when Walter was not there, would come and lean
against the doorpost, resting his weary wig as near the shoe-buckles of
the guardian genius of his trade and shop as he could. But no fierce
idol with a mouth from ear to ear, and a murderous visage made of
parrot’s feathers, was ever more indifferent to the appeals of its
savage votaries, than was the Midshipman to these marks of attachment.
Walter’s heart felt heavy as he looked round his old bedroom, up among
the parapets and chimney-pots, and thought that one more night already
darkening would close his acquaintance with it, perhaps for ever.
Dismantled of his little stock of books and pictures, it looked coldly
and reproachfully on him for his desertion, and had already a
foreshadowing upon it of its coming strangeness. “A few hours more,”
thought Walter, “and no dream I ever had here when I was a schoolboy
will be so little mine as this old room. The dream may come back in my
sleep, and I may return waking to this place, it may be: but the dream
at least will serve no other master, and the room may have a score, and
every one of them may change, neglect, misuse it.”
But his Uncle was not to be left alone in the little back parlour,
where he was then sitting by himself; for Captain Cuttle, considerate
in his roughness, stayed away against his will, purposely that they
should have some talk together unobserved: so Walter, newly returned
home from his last day’s bustle, descended briskly, to bear him
company.
“Uncle,” he said gaily, laying his hand upon the old man’s shoulder,
“what shall I send you home from Barbados?”
“Hope, my dear Wally. Hope that we shall meet again, on this side of
the grave. Send me as much of that as you can.”
“So I will, Uncle: I have enough and to spare, and I’ll not be chary of
it! And as to lively turtles, and limes for Captain Cuttle’s punch, and
preserves for you on Sundays, and all that sort of thing, why I’ll send
you ship-loads, Uncle: when I’m rich enough.”
Old Sol wiped his spectacles, and faintly smiled.
“That’s right, Uncle!” cried Walter, merrily, and clapping him half a
dozen times more upon the shoulder. “You cheer up me! I’ll cheer up
you! We’ll be as gay as larks to-morrow morning, Uncle, and we’ll fly
as high! As to my anticipations, they are singing out of sight now.”
“Wally, my dear boy,” returned the old man, “I’ll do my best, I’ll do
my best.”
“And your best, Uncle,” said Walter, with his pleasant laugh, “is the
best best that I know. You’ll not forget what you’re to send me,
Uncle?”